City College

Best-selling mystery writer and City College alum Walter Mosley talks about the creative process, major influences in his life, and a myriad other topics, with Terrance McKnight, host of WQXR’s Evening Music. Mosley, best known for his crime fiction featuring black private investigator Easy Rawlins, inspired creation of the City College Publishing Certificate Program (PCP) and was recently honored at the 2014 Langston Hughes Festival.

CCNY’s Spitzer School of Architecture hosts an unprecedented exhibition on Antoni Gaudí’s “unfinished masterpiece” — Sagrada Família, the basílica in Barcelona that generations of architects and builders have continued since Gaudí’s death in 1926. George Ranalli, dean of the architecture school, talks about the world’s longest-running construction project and how he brought to New York this rare collection of original drawings, plaster casts and other architectural artifacts that have never been out of Spain.

In her new book, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, City College history professor Beth Baron recounts the brutal beating of a 15-year-old Muslim girl by Christian missionaries in 1933 and tells how the incident spurred the growth of one of Islam’s most influential political organizations.

In this impressive collection, Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations, City College professor Retha Powers documents the words and lyrics of legendary African-American voices from Malcolm X to Maya Angelou. Powers discusses her eight-year research project in compiling the book and her hope in educating young people on black written and oral tradition.

Not long ago a computer was hardly a necessity, and even if its modern magic was intriguing, it was out of the reach of the average person. “There were many people who thought I was throwing away my career,” says Internet pioneer Robert E. Kahn, when he started out in the field. “In the 1960s, […]

In “Rethinking Kahn,” part of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture spring lecture series, architectural historian William J.R. Curtis discusses the legacy of famed architect Louis Kahn, including his final project — Four Freedoms Park — a four-acre memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt that was completed posthumously as “a powerful work of monumentality.” […]

Defending her goal of transforming car-clogged streets into pedestrian plazas, the city’s transportation chief says her initiatives have boosted the number of visitors and, in the case of Times Square, have also been a boon for local businesses. “More people are spending time — eating, taking pictures and hanging out,” says Janette Sadik-Khan, who has served as commissioner of the Department of Transportation for the past five years. Sadik-Khan, in a speech, “It’s Not Impossible to Change a City,” at the 8th annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism at City College, discussed initiatives that improve public safety and ease mobility. “Times Square was named one of the top 10 retail locations in the world — this certainly would not have been the case years ago,” says Sadik-Khan.

For every dollar earned by a man in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, a female counterpart earns 14 percent less, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. It’s a statistic that City College professor Maribel Vazquez says must change. “Women in the workforce lack strong negotiation skills, Vazquez says, “because female aggression is perceived negatively by both men and women.” Vazquez delivered the keynote address at “Women in Science: Negotiating a Successful Academic Career,” a panel discussion at the CUNY Graduate Center. An associate professor of Biomedical Engineering, Vazquez also presented her research on the use of micro and nanotechnology in the study of cell migration in the brain.

The Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge program, also known as SEEK, has been renamed in honor of the late Percy E. Sutton, a prominent black political and business leader. Sutton, from Harlem, served as Manhattan borough president from 1966 to 1977, and also as a New York State Assemblyman, where he was a pivotal force behind the legislation that established the SEEK program-which offers unique and supportive educational opportunity to students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds-and is available at each of the senior colleges of CUNY.Listen Now>>

Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, “Fallingwater,” originally was conceived as a vacation home in the woods, with views of a nearby waterfall — a plan Wright soon scrapped after seeing the natural beauty of the place. Wright wanted the Kaufmann family “to live with the waterfall — not just look at it,” said Robert McCarter, author of several books on Wright, at City College’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Lecture Series. McCarter, a professor of architecture at Washington State University, says Wright “wanted it to be an integral part of their lives.”Listen Now>>